domain:badcyber.com
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
11hr ago
issue being much more pressing and therefore developing differently in modern-day India.
The people from aristocracy here have notably higher amounts of steppe ancestry, though phenotype isn't a 1 to 1 with your genotype. The attempts at a preservation of a nobility were carried out here in a much stricter sense.
Norse Paganism isn't that Christian though, the idea that all of what we see in their folklore is heavily inspired by Christianity cannot be true for all of their folklore. Tom has listed plenty of them in the work he does with his own revival and many go agaisnt Christian values. It includes Anglo mythology as well.
Greek/Roman paganism remains the supreme representation of pre-Christian, European worship.
Its unfortunately dead and still differs from innate values many live by. They can't draw inspiration from that which is forgotten and also isn't appealing. My central theme is that the values they find within texts found south of the Indus are appealing because they carry the sMe same values they wish for which they cannot find in Christianity and also in Greek lore, which is also why the modern revival movement, the non larpy parts lean towards germanic myths.
The entirety of It's Such A Beautiful Day by Don Hertzfeldt (also the creator of Rejected) is a big comfort movie for me, but in particular I watch the part detailing Bill's family history, the mediation on death in the middle of the film, as well as the finale again and again and again. There is a lot in this film that resonates with me; it's bizarre and existential and scratches an itch virtually no other film does.
In the hands of anyone else it would have been pretentious, absurdist schlock, but there's a sincerity to the film that makes it feel meaningful.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
11hr ago
And I don't see anything inherently good about human civilization ending. I'm neutral about it. If human civilization ends after my generation, I'm fine with it
Tell me you don't have kids without telling me you don't have kids.
A note on motivations.
I often see people making arguments of the type of "we need to get fertility rates (across the board, or maybe just for group X) up otherwise human civilization will collapse".
Here's the thing though. I'm fine with human civilization ending. I don't see anything inherently good about human civilization continuing. And I don't see anything inherently good about human civilization ending. I'm neutral about it. If human civilization ends after my generation, I'm fine with it. Of course I want living standards to continue to be good during my generation at least, but that doesn't mean that I have any attachment to the idea of wanting to maintain human civilization 100 or 1000 years from now. And if human civilization continues after me, I'm fine with that too. I don't care much one way or the other.
Humanity has been doing this whole reproduction thing for hundreds of thousands of years now. Repetition and quantity is not the same thing as quality.
I get that it feels different if you have kids, which I don't. I might be interested in having kids, but I'm not sure if I want any or not yet.
In any case, if you have kids, I didn't force you to have kids. I hope your kids do well, but it doesn't change my fundamental calculus.
I enjoy being alive, but I see no fundamental deep importance in keeping the human species existing. I'm not a nihilist in the least bit. I love being alive in a very visceral way. I love the smell of flowers, the look of sunshine in the sky. I just see no clear positive advantage to continuing the species. Or to ending it. Like I said, I'm neutral on the matter. If the species continues, cool. If it ends, cool. I don't want to end, and I don't want any currently alive humans to end, but to me the idea of continuing the species beyond that is very abstract and I really don't care about it.
Aapje58
11hr ago
First of all, anybody who ever set foot in Israel knows Israeli society is incredibly racially diverse - Jews come from Europe, from Middle East, from Africa, from a huge number of places.
Obviously I am considering Jews to be a single race in this context, just like Israel does.
And of course Israel is full of other religious and ethnic groups - Christians, Muslims, Bahai, Druze, Bedouin, Circassian, I could be here all day.
Yeah, just like South Africa was a very racially diverse country under Apartheid. Still, the laws of Apartheid made it a country designed first and foremost around the well-being of white people, establishing a racial hierarchy, where other races were tolerated at best, with far lesser rights. Non-Jews are not treated as first-class citizens in Israel. So the goal was to create a racially pure society where the only equals that white people met would be other whites.
Note that this is not the same as a racially pure country, where only one race is tolerated in the country. Slave-era US states also had the goal of a racially pure society, but were obviously far from a single-race state.
And South Africa did its best to ensure racial purity by intermarriage laws. While Israel doesn't go as far, they do not have civil marriage, and all marriages must happen under religious laws that restrict intermarriage. And religion is of course very strongly linked to race.
It is just torturing the definition of "race" to describe a completely normal and common thing - a national state. Israel is the state of Jews in the same meaning as Japan is the state of Japanese, China is the state of Chinese and Greece is the state of Greeks.
No, you are torturing the definition of race. Greek citizenship is based on whether the person is legally living there, not their race. Greek nationality law does have a provision to expedite the naturalization of 'ethnic Greeks' according to Wikipedia, but that merely requires the person to have a parent or grandparent that was born a Greek national. So their legal definition of ethnic Greek does not seem to be actually ethnic. It doesn't matter if that parent or grandparent is ethnically Greek, Albanian, Roma, Jewish, etc, as long as they were born a legal Greek citizen.
This is different from Israel, where they will let in Jews who have been in the diaspora for very many generations, but not people who were actually born in the territory of current Israel, but that fled during the 1948 Palestine war.
except that somehow Israel is held to insane and impossible standards never applied to any other nation.
All these 'insane and impossible standards' are only insane and impossible if you consider the goal of a racially defined state that gets to steal land from people to be legitimate. For example, it's basic international law that refugees should be allowed to return to their homes after a conflict, but in the case of Israel this is somehow suddenly completely unreasonable.
And of course it is completely unreasonable to expect Israel not to take Syrian land that is just there for the taking, just like the international community is totally fine with Russia taking territory. Only Israel gets criticized, you see. No one is funding Ukraine so it can defend itself.
This tired talking point about double standards being applied to Israel is the most worn out argument that is just based on playing the victim. That way you don't actually have to defend the behavior, which is often indefensible.
Even though Israeli Arabs (of which many do not identify as "Palestinians" at all and do not want to live under Hamas rule) have exactly the same rights and citizenship as everybody else
False. Israeli Arabs are excluded from conscription, so they are not equal.
But most discrimination happens through laws that are ostensibly neutral, but applied unequally. For example, the law on removing the citizenship for 'acts of terror' is not applied equally to Jewish terrorists. In fact, Israeli soldiers have been known to just let Jews commit terrorist attacks: https://www.btselem.org/node/216862
So if an Arab commits a terror attack, he can lose his citizenship and be kicked out. If a Jew does so, the Israeli military is there to make sure that the terrorist doesn't get hurt. Very considerate.
You can't even keep it straight in one sentence. You can't accuse Israel in both ghetto-ising the Arab population and ethnically cleansing them - it's the diametrically opposite actions
So when Hitler was using ghettos to isolate the Jews from support by non-Jews and to make it easy for him to implement his final solution, he was actually accidentally protecting the Jews by putting them into the ghetto?
An interesting take on history to be sure.
In ghetto, you put the bad people into a confined space, in cleansing, you remove them from the space.
Driving people together is a typical precursor to cleansing.
Anyway, my claim is not that the Israeli leadership has a singular goal. They have more and less radical elements. Some want mere ghettos, some want ethnic cleansing and a few seem to want a genocide. None seem to want a viable Palestinian state (or states).
if you let Arabs have their own territory, rules by themselves [...] that's a ghetto, bad thing.
I have a hard time believing that you are arguing in good faith if you equate a free nation state to a ghetto. Setting up a straw man where you, without any evidence, claim that I would call a free Palestinian state a ghetto is not a basis for a debate.
And you don't have to look far and wide for it, you just ask anybody in Gaza what they want. They will tell you - they want to "free Palestine" from Jews. [...] . Not equal rights with the Jews but the Jews dead.
You are treating a diverse group of people as a single hive mind, which is just another form of strawmanning. I have seen no poll that shows that all Palestinians are in favor of killing all Jews. I find it extremely unlikely that is the case. But please provide the proof if you have any.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
11hr ago
These are very half formed thoughts. Musings really. So take everything I'm about to say with a grain of salt.
I think a lot these days about what makes a civilization. I definitely lean towards the line of thought that culture is downstream of genetics. If you replace a people inhabiting a land wholesale, you get a different nation and a different civilization. I harp on IQ a great deal, but there are all manner of uncorrelated or weakly correlated personality traits that influence a civilization at scale.
And then I look at the fall of the Roman Empire. On the one hand, there is a story that can be told where the Roman Empire became just another economic zone, too decadent and corrupt to bother with the labor of maintaining it's own existence. On the other hand there is a story where Christianity somehow carried the seeds of Roman greatness through the ages so that they could flourish among dozens of different people's in the successor Kingdom's in Europe where the rapacious barbarian's settled. They were taught to settle, cultivate, and have a lower time preference. It's hard to imagine a pagan Europe, where Christianity had never been invented. I don't think anyone can figure that counter factual. But it does appear, or at least a story can be told, that the religion of the Roman Empire which outlived it, helped elevate the dozens of tribes that brought it down in it's place.
Although I suppose there is also a discussion to be had about the role of Christianity in allowing infinite rapacious barbarians inside it's open doors these days. I donno, I can see it both ways.
To address your post more directly, even were I to assume that ancient aspects of the Pagan Hindu faith are the only living, practiced Pagan tradition between some far flung Ayran common ancestor... what does it have to offer me to "retvrn" to it? Compare the post-Pagan European society to a Pagan India today? You can make the appeal to some sort of authentic ancestral legacy, but it takes more than that to sell me. There are a few peer nations that seem to have something over on modern day European civilization which I would consider taking a lesson or two from. India is probably in the bottom quintile of that list.
Or to phrase it another way, take what Christianity did to recivilize Europe in the aftermath of one of the most devastating civilizational collapses since the Bronze Age Collapse, and compare it to what the Vedas have done to uplift India.
TwiceHuman
11hr ago
I sort of disagree, but only because I do not agree with the definition of "powerful" or "high-status". From an aesthetical, logical, and spiritual perspective, these people possess traits which only mimic good development. From an evopsych perspective, I'm more neutral: Social status is high value in a sense, but excess sociability is also a sign of weakness and therefore low value.
Powerful men might think that this benefits them, but that's only because they're elite normies. Above average in many areas, but not truly intelligent, and therefore unable to consider second and third-order effects. In short, it's locally beneficial and globally harmful.
I agree that this is causing the power-law distribution to get steeper
It's just begging the question though- according to ancient myth the colonizers who constructed the temples to Apollo at Delphi and Delos were the race of hyperboreans emerging from the northern-most land in existence. Of course Apollo himself represents a Northern European phenotype and physical ideal- Apollo was called "the most Greek" by the Greeks themselves. It points to a common ancestry with the warring tribes that did the same on the Italian peninsula- as foundational colonizers. An important element of those myths was to preserve lineage of the noble class, with the issue being much more pressing and therefore developing differently in modern-day India.
In contrast, the earliest archeological reference to Odin ever is the 5th century AD, centuries after the development of Christianity. But we know Tyr was worshiped for thousands of years before that before being eclipsed by Odin. The Edda was written in Medieval times, hundreds of years after Christianity. Norse Paganism is not a better representation of pre-Christian Germanic worship, given it was established after Christianity and was clearly influenced by Christianity. Greek/Roman paganism remains the supreme representation of pre-Christian, European worship.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11hr ago
It's just harder to establish an intent
Right, so, one of the things I allude to in my original post is that this bit is really vague in UK law, as best I can tell. Sometimes it seems like "harassment" under UK law requires specific and directed intent, but sometimes not. And even when intent is required, the kind of intent is usually something like "intent to cause distress or shame." But of course screaming "NICE GAMS," while it might very well cause embarrassment to the admiree, is perfectly consistent with intending to make a woman feel good about herself, rather than to cause distress or shame. So when you say--
The catcaller is manifestly trying to get a specific woman's attention and prevent her from going about her business undisturbed
--this seems at least half mistaken. The catcaller wants to get someone's attention to pay her a compliment, albeit perhaps a compliment she'd rather not receive. (Is it also "catcalling" to yell putative insults at a woman, e.g. "whore" or "slut?" I think maybe this also would qualify as catcalling, but then the vulgarity and more aggressively threatening content of the speech seems to more clearly establish hostile intent.) Disturbing her "business" does not seem to be a necessary (or indeed generally intended) aspect of catcalling.
Likewise, UK law seems to think that you can direct harmful intent without a specific target in mind--for example, using PSPOs to forbid people from protesting near abortion clinics. Merely holding a sign that says "abortion is murder" near an abortion clinic need not be done with any intent to impinge on any specific individual. Likewise, wearing a diaphanous string bikini to walk around a busy pedestrian area need not be done with any intent to impinge on any specific individual, and yet a reasonable person might well find it an alarming sight--and doubt that it was done with anything less than mischievous intent.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
11hr ago
I humbly disagree, the view of the afterlife and the eddic texts clearly display shared ancestry with the values we deem holy. Also, most of these people are of germanic stock by definition, if you are to be influenced by another group of ancestor worshippers, you're bound to find the values of the much more fleshed out one than that which differs and is also dead. Amlteh and Achilles are two very different examples, though I have not read the odyssey so my perception might be incorrect or incomplete.
Not calling Greeks or Italians non white here, the religious perspective isn't simply limited to a sky father existing. Dayus Petr is a diety in all Indo European faiths but they still differ a lot.
There's a huge divide among "neo-pagans" between Greek/Roman interpretation and Norse paganism.
But the vast majority of the sources we have on Norse paganism are very late, post-Christian, and preserved (and thus filtered) through Christian sources. Take a figure like Odin who appears to be heavily influenced by Christianity - as is well known Odin was hung from a tree. Odin himself is a trickster, appears to be more of a (Christian-influenced) archetypical confabulation of Jupiter and Saturn. Norse paganism may have developed as a sort of temporary bridge between the two traditions.
In contrast, the proto-indo-european "Sky Father", Dyeus Phter, the seat of the gods, is very clearly transmitted in the Greek Zeûs Pater and Roman Jupiter. Of course Jupiter derives from the Proto-Indo-European compound Dyeus Phter- "sky-father" or "shining father". The lack of an unequivocal solar chieftain god in Norse paganism stands out here. There's also strong evidence for such tribal organization in Greek society.
My own curiosity in these questions pertains to the interactions between myth and genetic evolution. Hinduism would be an example par excellence for the extremely underappreciated interaction of the two, but it's not a good example of the preservation of proto-indo-european religion. I still think Greek/Roman paganism is the best we have on that front.
celluloid_dream
11hr ago
Yes, that is the argument. Downvoting on political allegiance is corrosive to this site. I don't want to litigate the specific value of each example. You can find something in each to downvote on, I'm sure. God forbid someone have a little fun with a turn of phrase, quoting a meme, etc. etc. but considering they are minority opinions, and we want to preserve a diverse ideological ecosystem, they should be at least left alone, not shunned. That's how you get .. gestures at the trajectory of this site over the years.
But I will say it's interesting that so many seem to interpret aldomilyar's comment as problematic. I happen to unironically hold that opinion. I think most people I know IRL would agree with it. If that is considered snark or trolling here, maybe the situation is more dire than I thought.
Rosencrantz2
11hr ago
This seems super culturally mediated, though--I'm not sure I'm in a good position to just tell a pious Muslim or devout Amish that his feelings about bikinis simply don't count the way that a modern woman's feelings about wolf whistles does.
Perhaps but we are talking about UK culture, which I am part of, and so I do feel fairly comfortable telling a British religious person this. Moreover there's a gradient of feelings where some religious people will be upset about even having to see parts of a woman's face or hair, and in this extreme case I don't feel too many qualms about telling them they need to get over their feelings. Perhaps that's the same in reverse as a catcaller telling a woman she needs to get over her objections to catcalling, but so be it.
I'm not sure I see how catcalling "actively get[s] into someone's space," which is why I noted that provided the 18 arrests were made for actual assault rather than mere catcalling, there's less to complain about here. The realm of "offensive speech" and unwilling audiences is a fascinating one for legal theorists precisely because what counts as "invading" someone's "space" in public is really tricky. Our bodies are an easy place to draw a line: unwanted physical contact is bad! Our senses are much more complicated. How is dressing provocatively any different from speaking provocatively, from the perspective of the unwilling audience? Are our ears more important than our eyes, somehow? "You can just look away!"--or--"you can just plug your ears!" There seem to be a lot of unstated assumptions in the assertion that there is a "significant" difference between catcalling and parading around in provocative clothing.
For sure there's a theoretical debate to be had which I think is perhaps too laborious to really get into here, but part of that debate would need to get into questions of intent. The catcaller is manifestly trying to get a specific woman's attention and prevent her from going about her business undisturbed. The skimpily dressed woman may also be trying to distract a given man. But we actually don't know, and most of the time cannot know, if she is or not merely from the fact of her dress. It's just harder to establish an intent to impinge on a specific individual to the woman in this case than the man. If she actively flashes a body part at a specific man, we would have established an intent towards that particular person, and in that case, the woman's act is similarly invasive as catcalling – maybe even if another woman is showing a similar amount of skin as a matter of course, but not pushing it specifically towards a given unconsenting man. Innocence is not merely in what is shown but how it's shown.
Celestial-body-NOS
Quod non licet bovi, non liceat Iovi.
12hr ago
Was [L]emuria ever a science hypothesis?
Originally, it was attempting to provide a mechanism for how lemur fossils were found in India and Madagascar. (For today's lucky 10,000, lemurs are a tree-dwelling mammal related to monkeys and apes.)
naraburns
nihil supernum
12hr ago
I'm not sure whether this is your point, but if I were the kind of person to take that particular Biblical edict seriously, I would likely be in favor of laws that discouraged other people from behaving in ways that might tend to inspire rebelliousness in my extremities.
Yes, the end of trainspotting where Mark Renton gives his monologue.
I saw trainspotting at the end of my 10th grade, each year after the end of an academic year, we'd get a short spring break before classes for the next grade began, 11th is when people join cram schools, stop showing up to school and you "grow up" to do better in standardised tests where selection percentages are zero point something.
Trainspottings ending is cathartic, it's a funny, gritty, dreamy movie that captures north UK very well, at least from the people from that part I've interacted with.
I knew life would get worse starting next month which it did. It's a great movie, recommend it and it's sequel to everyone. Born Slippy is a fucking banger.
WandererintheWilderness
12hr ago
I'm not sure I'm in a good position to just tell a pious Muslim or devout Amish that his feelings about bikinis simply don't count
Well, maybe you're not but here is an appeal to authority that the devout Amish, at least, should acknowledge.
The white race as we see it has aryans as a large part of their own heritage but facial [ reconstruction itself doesn't make them look like the [blue eyed blonde haired people you would see in discussions.] (https://www.razibkhan.com/p/steppe-20-swipe-right-on-a-steppe) Not denying that they were paler than South Asians, but still swarthy.
The caste system was implemented too late.
The biggest mistake was letting the underclass flourish, castes or jatis are an indus valley thing, varna is what aryans had which is why you had similar systems in ancient germanic lands, I'll have to go through some survivethejive for references for that.
They see a religion that ultimately precipitated the degeneration of the ruling caste and the dysgenic hellscape that followed
Unfortunately the decline here has been quite steep, it would have been worse under Islam or Christianity since there would have been no castes, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan all show how bad that could have been.
Greek/Roman paganism is a way better inspiration for those people than Hinduism.
You can't pick and choose these things. The germanic faith was much closer to what we worship here than the Greek for instance. If you are of an Indo European heritage and worship your ancestors, you can never ignore the most developed faith in that pantheon, also the only alive one.
Tom Roswell who runs survivethejive shows an amazing amount of restraint towards Hindus, unfortunately the bad comments he gets are mostly from 80 iq people who hate him for bringing up the Aryan Invasion, even though it doesn't change religious beliefs one whit, beyond making the othering the upper castes. He still defends Hindus and Hinduism because he too can recognize the importance of its existence, despite sustained efforts to kill off ploythiesm.
Modern Indians, vast majority are not representative of those who are worthy of their heritage, the aesthetics around us are terrible. Which needs to change.
TowardsPanna
12hr ago
Do you have "comfort movies," or even particular scenes in a movie that you've watched an unlikely number of times?
Sometimes when I just need some emotional nutrition during low energy ebbs of the day, or when I'm just bored of how much some aspects of the current world suck, I just want to take in something I know I'll like.
One of them is Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Especially the first third. I like the brief interviews with Mizutani for some reason. And the beautiful sad music that plays from 22:30 when Jiro talks about his tragic childhood.
anti_dan
12hr ago
If you can't throw an apple and peanut butter sandwich in a bag how are you even considered a parent?
I disagree about them being good in theory, and certainly in practice they seem an epic failure. The food is either not healthy or not eaten by the target audience.
I guess I can imagine being of a puritan mindset where I would want to suppress feelings of being attracted out of shame, or out of a strong moral view on female virtue, and therefore would prefer form-fitting clothing be kept away from me wherever possible. Is that where you're going with this, or something else?
The example I provided was a picture of women in full niqab. My experience with men from countries where niqab is common is that they are often extremely distressed by the comparatively immodest dress of Western women. Traces of that remain in most Western regimes, too, though usually limited to the exposure of genitals (and sometimes breasts) being treated as legitimately "distressing" to display.
(Fun fact: Australia used to require protruding labia to be removed from pornographic displays, so even in contexts where it was legal to display female genitalia, it was not legal to do so with complete anatomical accuracy! I have seen it argued that this may have contributed to the rise of cosmetic labiaplasties.)
I do think there is highly significant asymmetry of discomfort between a woman being catcalled and a pious man seeing some legging-clad ass
This seems super culturally mediated, though--I'm not sure I'm in a good position to just tell a pious Muslim or devout Amish that his feelings about bikinis simply don't count the way that a modern woman's feelings about wolf whistles does.
a fairly significant difference between actively getting into someone's space by catcalling them and just being seen by them as you go about your own business
I'm not sure I see how catcalling "actively get[s] into someone's space," which is why I noted that provided the 18 arrests were made for actual assault rather than mere catcalling, there's less to complain about here. The realm of "offensive speech" and unwilling audiences is a fascinating one for legal theorists precisely because what counts as "invading" someone's "space" in public is really tricky. Our bodies are an easy place to draw a line: unwanted physical contact is bad! Our senses are much more complicated. How is dressing provocatively any different from speaking provocatively, from the perspective of the unwilling audience? Are our ears more important than our eyes, somehow? "You can just look away!"--or--"you can just plug your ears!" There seem to be a lot of unstated assumptions in the assertion that there is a "significant" difference between catcalling and parading around in provocative clothing.
("But you shouldn't think of something like exercise clothing as sexually provocative!" "No, you shouldn't think of something like catcalling as provocative!" Etc.)
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
12hr ago
· Edited 12hr ago
Right. I mean, I think it would be progress if the "humans > AI" camp habitually named objectively quantifiable things that they themselves can do and they assert the LLMs can't, which aren't gotchas that depend on differences that are orthogonal to intelligence as usually understood ("touch your nose 5+8 times"). We could then weigh those things against all the things the LLMs can do that the speaker can't (like, solve IMO problems), and argue about which side of the delta looks more like intelligence.
Currently, I'm really not seeing much of that; the arguments all seem to cherry-pick historical peaks of human achievement ("can AI write a symphony?"), be based on vibes ("my poems are based on true feelings, rather than slop") or involve Russell conjugation ("I cleverly inject literary references and use phrasing that reflects my education; the AI stochastically parrots").
I already covered that.
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